News

Why are Britain and France so different? This question is back in the air. Trade union officials have been complaining that Britain’s flexible labour laws made it easier for Peugeot bosses to shut down their car plant at Ryton rather than any of its French counterparts.

Half a million marching in defence of immigration in Dallas, Texas, last Sunday. Hundreds of thousands more the next day in more than 60 other cities. Half a million in Los Angeles a few weeks ago&#8230; something big is happening in the US.

The rescue of Norman Kember and his fellow hostages in Baghdad is a tiny glimmer of light in an Iraqi picture that remains uniformly grim. John Reid’s gung-ho remarks on his recent visit to Iraq simply provided further evidence of the defence secretary’s very troubled relationship to reality.

No one should be in any doubt about Tony Blair’s arrogance in saying that god will judge him for invading Iraq. The implication was that he doesn’t care about the judgement of mere mortals such as the rest of us.

It is, of course, utterly hypocritical for George Bush and Tony Blair, both commanding vast nuclear arsenals, to denounce Iran for deciding to restart its uranium enrichment programme. I heard one US neo-con, Frank Gaffney, ranting and raving on the radio the other day about how uniquely evil the Islamic regime in Iran is.

Last week the sixth anniversary of the protests in Seattle passed without much notice. The passage of time has, however, if anything underlined the importance of the challenge that demonstrators mounted to the World Trade Organisation summit on 30 November 1999.

When George Galloway was interviewed on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme a few weeks ago, John Humphreys taunted him with the suggestion that Respect was a single issue party whose issue — the war in Iraq — would have disappeared by the time of the next general election.